Grant County's Grants for Grads is questioned by some officials

The program, funded through the Grant County Economic Growth Council, gifts funds to newcomers who are new residents in Grant County, who are working in and want to live in the area. They also must be college or technical school graduates. The money, which comes from a fund that includes tax dollars, exists for the affluent as much as for the needy.

According to Tim Eckerle, executive director of the Growth Council, for new renters, the program offers a grant for $2,500 that can be used for up to a year for rental assistance. The money is given to the apartment complex office and used as a credit on behalf of the approved renter until the balance is used. For homeowners, a gift up to $5,000 can be used as down payment assistance on a home purchase.

The program has a $100,000 annual budget, which County Council Member Mike Roorbach said will be among the Growth Council expenditures to come into question this summer.

Grants for Grads is funded by the Growth Council, which is in turn funded by the Economic Development Income Tax (EDIT) collected in Grant County. The council receives 12 percent annually of the tax, which amounted to $333,000 at the beginning of the year, according to County Auditor Roger Bainbridge.

Roorbach said that while the program may provide incentive for newcomers, he’s not sure the current amount the Growth Council receives from the EDIT fund is sustainable in the county’s current financial state.

“The Growth Council budget looks very different from the county’s budget right now, because we’ve given them that kind of money,” Roorbach said. “The question is whether tax dollars should be going to the Growth Council … Although they are private, I regard them as a county department, and all department budgets are on the table (for cuts) this summer.”

Mark Bardsley, Grant County commissioner who also represents the Board of Commissioners on the Growth Council, said the investment is worthwhile if it’s attracting educated people to the area.

“The county has worked with the Economic Growth Council for years, and the projects that we try and push forward are ones that will bring new enhancement to the community,” he said. “If we can keep the scholars here, the people who are going to invest their future, develop their families here, make their work here, those types of things I think are beneficial.”

Bardsley said the county’s return on investment in the program comes with the growth of any community in the area.

“We’ve always had this philosophy that if one of us wins, we all win,” he said. “That’s the way we look at it with the Growth Council. If they’re bringing in more business or they’re helping us with scholars … I think it’s a win for us.”

Mike Hicks, director for the Ball State University Center for Business and Economic Research, said a $100,000 annual investment in incentivizing home purchases could find better uses.

Hicks said the money is mostly being given to newcomers whose decision to be in Grant County doesn’t hinge on the gift.

“Recent college graduates are some of the most affluent people in Grant County,” he said. “It’s giving money to people who most likely would have lived in the area anyway, and aren’t choosing homes in run down neighborhoods to make improvements.”

Hicks added that $100,000 a year could be put into improving areas with blight, or be invested into the downtown area as a revolving loan for beautification. He said improvements may be slow, but a long-term investment may bear greater fruit.

“Take Indianapolis for example, they worked street by street pulling up asphalt to reveal brick pavers, retrofitting buildings, and once they were finished with one they moved on to the next one,” he said. “One hundred thousand dollars a year can’t buy a lot, but half a million over five years might start to make a difference.”

Additionally, he said the use of taxpayer money from low-income areas to incentivize “affluent groups” to live and work here is “counterintuitive” and “stupid.”

In 2017, the Growth Council provided grants for 24 new homeowners in Grant County, ranging from the Converse to Fairmount area. Grants for Grads is funded through a budget that Eckerle said is a “mixture” of the EDIT taxes and private donor funds.

Eckerle said the program is a device for employers to use in their recruitment process and offers another positive to living in the area.

“This is supposed to give them another reason to live in Grant County,” he said.

Mikayla Marazzi, director of marketing and communications for the Growth Council, became a new homeowner herself earlier this year. The Growth Council offered $5,000 in down payment assistance as an employee benefit, though Eckerle said it was separate from the Grants for Grads program.

Rebecca Johnson is an employee at a local law office in Marion who took advantage of the program in 2017. Johnson was a law student from Bloomington looking for work in the area. Upon interviewing, she said she heard about the Grants for Grads program.

After accepting the job, she said they looked for apartments in the area and had no luck finding something suitable, but the Grants for Grads program gave them $5,000 in assistance with a down payment on a home, and they received money back from their closing costs from overpaying after the council’s financial assistance.

“We were able to move into homeownership a lot sooner,” Johnson said.

Eckerle said he estimates the return on investment for the community happens 10-fold.

According to the Growth Council, the Grants for Grads program has gotten the community around $84,100 total across five years in additional county option income. That assumes none of the benefiting residents would have lived in Grant County were it not for the program. The annual amount given away by the Growth Council during the same five years would have been $500,000 based on the annual budget.

Eckerle said he foresees the program remaining at its current size to continue offering living assistance for new residents.

Roorbach said the Growth Council will need to provide evidence of the effectiveness of their programs in the community in the coming months as the county budget is reevaluated.